Strohmaier M., Prettenhofer P., Kröll Mark
2008
On the web, search engines represent a primary instrument through which users exercise their intent. Understanding the specific goals users express in search queries could improve our theoretical knowledge about strategies for search goal formulation and search behavior, and could equip search engine providers with better descriptions of users’ information needs. However, the degree to which goals are explicitly expressed in search queries can be suspected to exhibit considerable variety, which poses a series of challenges for researchers and search engine providers. This paper introduces a novel perspective on analyzing user goals in search query logs by proposing to study different degrees of intentional explicitness. To explore the implications of this perspective, we studied two different degrees of explicitness of user goals in the AOL search query log containing more than 20 million queries. Our results suggest that different degrees of intentional explicitness represent an orthogonal dimension to existing search query categories and that understanding these different degrees is essential for effective search. The overall contribution of this paper is the elaboration of a set of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that makes a strong case for further studies of different degrees of intentional explicitness in search query logs.
Rath Andreas S., Weber Nicolas, Kröll Mark, Granitzer Michael, Dietzel O., Lindstaedt Stefanie
2008
Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is anopen research challenge. Our approach is based onproviding a large variety of knowledge services which takethe current work task and information need (work context)of the knowledge worker into account. In the following wepresent the DYONIPOS application which strives toautomatically identify a user’s work task and thencontextualizes different types of knowledge servicesaccordingly. These knowledge services then provideinformation (documents, people, locations) both from theuser’s personal as well as from the organizationalenvironment. The utility and functionality is illustratedalong a real world application scenario at the Ministry ofFinance in Austria.
Granitzer Michael, Kröll Mark, Seifer Christin, Rath Andreas S., Weber Nicolas, Dietzel O., Lindstaedt Stefanie
2008
’Context is key’ conveys the importance of capturing thedigital environment of a knowledge worker. Knowing theuser’s context offers various possibilities for support, likefor example enhancing information delivery or providingwork guidance. Hence, user interactions have to be aggregatedand mapped to predefined task categories. Withoutmachine learning tools, such an assignment has to be donemanually. The identification of suitable machine learningalgorithms is necessary in order to ensure accurate andtimely classification of the user’s context without inducingadditional workload.This paper provides a methodology for recording user interactionsand an analysis of supervised classification models,feature types and feature selection for automatically detectingthe current task and context of a user. Our analysisis based on a real world data set and shows the applicabilityof machine learning techniques.